Yesterday’s dinner was inspired from some of the last of our winter squashes going bad (or at least developing bad spots) and therefore a squash meal was conceived. Pasta, squash, ricotta. Simple.

Spelt Berries and Red Winter Wheat Berries.

I made pasta with some spelt flour (1 cup of red winter wheat flour and 1/2 cup of spelt) just to try it out.

Whole Wheat-Spelt Fettucine.

The pasta dough turned out really nice. Texturally, the spelt flour made the dough more semolina like.

Chopped up kabocha squash.

One of our dwindling store of onions with sage and a bit of nutmeg, frying in bacon grease.

A lovely mixture of squash, onion, sage, and nutmeg.

While that cooked, I prepared a salad from some languishing apples and golden beets. I needed something crunchy, since all of this later winter early spring food has been soft soft soft. We can’t wait for lettuce!

Beautiful golden beets, sliced thinly, to go along with the apple on the cutting board

We have quite a few cranberries left in our freezer, and a cranberry-ginger dressing seemed like just the ticket to give our salad-o-crunch a bit of pep and zing.

Finished beet-apple-cranberry salad

Final Squash and Pasta Product served with Narragansett Ricotta Cheese and lots of pepper.

All of dinner, with a local white wine, out on our little balcony, enjoying the waning spring evening.

After dinner, we went for a long walk to continue to enjoy the weather. It is supposed to rain for the next few days, and we wanted to get out and stretch our legs in the good weather. With all of the daffodils opening up, and lots of spring birds singing, it was heavenly.

For dessert, we actually didn’t want something too hot and baked. At the same time, we have some strawberries hiding in our freezer that need to be eaten before the fresh strawberries come into season. Theresa half-cooked the frozen strawberries with a little sugar and pureed the whole lot to make a sort-or-smoothie that was perfect. Light and sweet and very springy.

A briming glass of strawberry... look at how pink!

when the glass was almost empty, we added a little wine to it, swirled around, and had a lovely strawberry-wine cocktail type thing. Delish.

We also broke into a bag of pecans we had been given over Christmas (as Magda says “You waited this long?!). We are just about done with all of the nuts that Laura’s sister brought us from California, so we decided to break into our pecan stash.

Pecans are a lot easier to shell than we imagined, and made for a really fun evening activity while dreaming about lettuce, green garlic, green onions, strawberries and rhubarb. Green and crunchy is sounding really good right now. And last summer we got so sick of salads! It just shows that this can work, and your body does start to sync up to what you are going to have available. It just requires a little patience!

I hope everyone has been enjoying the springy weather these past few days!